The Singing Forest

Photo/Carol Rosegg

"It's disgusting to use the Holocaust to distract from your own sins," shouts Laszlo (Randy Harrison), upset with his shrink-turned-lover, Oliver (Mark Blum). As it turns out, Oliver's finally being honest about his mother, Loë (Olympia Dukakis), and his billionaire nephew, Jules Ahmad (Louis Cancelmi), so he shouts back "Sometimes life just is preposterous, you know?" These two liberties end up forming the crux of Craig Lucas's latest play, The Singing Forest, a slovenly three-act play that aims to be about the farcical coincidences of serious drama but is instead a seriously inconsequential farcical drama.

In Lucas's defense, everything from the title to the ending is glib (The Singing Forest refers to the image of gays in Nazi Germany screaming as they were strung up from trees), so things are at least consistently inconsistent. And thanks to John McDermott's set of sliding doors, there's a visual reminder of how "God reveals himself in what we like to call coincidences." The play starts with clear segues, as Gray (Jonathan Groff) meets with a therapist, Shar (Rob Campbell), who then turns to his therapist, Oliver, to confess how he yearns for Gray. In turn, Oliver brags about this turn of events to Shar's ex, Laszlo--who happens to work at a Starbucks with Gray's girlfriend, Beth (Susan Pourfar), the same Starbucks in which Loë, Loë's daughter Bertha (Deborah Offner), and Loë's grandson Jules, all show up, albeit in ways in which they remain largely unrecognizable to one another. (Gray, meanwhile, is actually just shrink-shopping for Jules.)

As if that weren't exhausting enough, the scenes soon start overlapping with one another, forming odd parallels and taking on huge leaps. It is not enough, say, that Loë opts to run a sex-hotline as a way of secretively doling out psychiatric advice--she also takes on Gray as a client (he fears he no longer has an identity) and Shar, who falls in love for Loë's masked, older-male voice. Taking things one step further, the play leaps back in time--to Vienna during the rise of the Third Reich--with Loë watching her younger self (Pourfar) once again fail to save her friends, Sigmund Freud (Pierre Epstein) included. If it went anywhere, we could all sit back comfortably and proclaim Lucas to be a genius; instead, Lucas falls in love with his own juggling, which leads to the glibness of performance for performance's sake (and accounts for much of the bloated, near-three-hour production).

On the positive side of things, the cast is also swept up in this tide of performance, and director Mark Wing-Davey makes the most of the ridiculous to stage an amusing showdown in Staten Island. Characters hide in bathrooms, dressers, trunks, and under benches, brandishing guns and breaking down doors, though what this stands for or has to do with the overall theme of Freudian therapy (and the somewhat symbolic and only occasional use of Nazism to that end) is anyone's guess. If it's meant to provide contrast to Loë's past--rape and murder being no laughing matter--it fails. If anything, seeing Loë covered with the blood of a manipulative Nazi when the scene reverts to the present day is just more distracting: it's the mark of a failed illusion. It is, after all, disgusting to use the Holocaust as a distraction.

Tribeca 2009: Day 2

The House of the Devil

Ti West is absolutely the right person to film Cabin Fever 2, given the technical chops and old-school homage he gives to horror with The House of the Devil. Of course, after sitting through the more-than-technically creepy thrills of this film, he could just as easily shoot another entry in this series. While the baby$itting opportunity that collegiate Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) follows to her potential doom is one of those "too good to be true" offers, West's film manages to follow in the footsteps of '80s horror without getting tangled up in cliche: he refines it as a style that simply becomes "true" to that eerie period of ill-lit rooms, creaky old houses, hammily normal villians (in this case, the dead-on Tom Noonan), and, of course, blood rituals and satanism. (C'mon, the fact that it's a lunar eclipse should be a "dead" giveaway.)

If West's love for the period isn't evident enough from the title of the film (let alone the retro title sequence), the uneventful first thirty minutes (for a horror film, at least: nobody dies) should convince you of his scene-building intentions. From the look of a slice of pizza down to the dialogue between Samantha and her steely best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig), from the music playing on her phone-book-sized Walkman (The Fixx's "One Thing Leads To Another") to the old-school sock-on-a-doorknob situation she faces back in her dorm room, it all seems real. Even Samantha's nervous mantra--"Keep it together"--plays on our expectations of the kittenish victim, slinking up dark stairwells, investigating strange sounds in the sink, and remarking on odd incongruities.

When the blood finally splatters, therefore, it has more of an effect, not less, and West orchestrates each sequence (especially the climax's use of ear-throbbing music) to get the most out of the shot. This also includes a lot of well-placed foreshadowing: a cigarette-lighter hints at the villain, the television's monster-movie broadcast parlays one old-school thriller for another, and people don't just run past bloody corpses--they slip over them. Of course, saying that House of the Devil is perfect for what it is has the downside of reminding audiences that it is exactly what it is, a niche retro horror flick. Of course, if ominous puns and frantic chase are your style, the film speaks for itself: "I promise to make this as painless for you as possible."

Moon

Don't be fooled by the fake commercial for Lunar Industries, a helium-mining operation on the moon that provides Earth with 70% of its power. Duncan Jones's clever one-man sci-fi drama, Moon, gets right to the nitty gritty, as a grizzly Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) suits up in a diry spacesuit and does his daily rounds as the lone on-site technican/astronaut for Lunar Industries. He's two weeks away from completing his three-year contract, his sanity maintained by the occasional messages from his wife and daughter, his work on a miniature model of his hometown, and the happy-faces projected by his robotic "friend," Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey).

Sam's unravelling a little bit, which is why, while recovering from a crash, he doesn't think much of seeing another version of himself. This second Sam, however, can't say the same for him--fresh out of the box, he puts the pieces together rather quickly, and aggressively seeks out the truth behind this three-year contract, suspecting Lunar Industries of some sketchy illegal cloning. Jones's utterly precise camerawork keeps things rolling, emphasizing the emptiness of space and how the odd presence of a second Sam confuses things. Rockwell delivers a great double-performance, too: by remaining low-key, he lends authenticity to his surroundings, and also finds enough of a common ground between the two Sams for there to be interesting friction over their differences, too (as when they play ping-pong).

There's not a lot of action in Moon, and the plot is a bit too simple given the speed at which it slowly unfolds (another twist would've gone a long way). However, by sticking with the ambiance, Jones manages to build a haunting feature film, one that's surprisingly eloquent on the subject of ethics in cloning, and the very idea of existence itself.

Tribeca 2009: Day 1

Dazzle (Oogverblindend)

The idea of trying to "measure sorrow" with a "socially engaged" camera makes Cyrus Frisch a rather daring filmmaker. But as Dazzle yields more and more to classical conventions, his filmic poetry--in fact, even the randomness of some shots--starts to feel forced. What starts out as neo-voyeurism with a philosophical twist soon settles into a contrived long-distance romance.

For the first half of the film, we see only what Kira (Georgina Verbaan) sees (and has seen) as she dumps her problems onto the troubled Argentinian doctor (Rutgar Hauer) who has accidentally called her. She's become a social recluse because of the way she sees humanity, and Frisch helps to further distort the slanted, shaky view from her window by toying with digital effects, from grainy B&W to solarized shots, and he provides plenty of black screens to emphasize the free-associative idea of being lost in thought. And there's plenty to think about, for when Kira isn't watching the sun reflect off the canal by her apartment in Amsterdam, she's watching the depravities of the drugged-out homeless, realizing that she cares more for a mouse drowning in coffee than a man slowly going insane in the -15°C night. In fact, she blames them for making her feel terrible: "Why shouldn't I have the right to look the other way?" she asks.

The forced viewpoint of the camera and the stretches of static images compel us to really listen to what she's saying, so when Frisch suddenly abandons this conceit, showing us what Kira looks like, we're able to remove ourselves from such complicated thoughts. In contrast with the overhead, seemingly candid shots of the Amsterdam populace, these scenes also cannot help but seem acted. Things worsen as Kira fights to convince this doctor--whom she actually turns out to know, and love--not to kill himself over the guilt he feels for his unconscious contributions to the military's acts of torture. In the end, it's pedantic, not dazzling.

In The Loop

Few things lend themselves to comedy more readily than politics: for every bit of double-talk--in this case, that war is neither unforeseeable nor foreseeable--there's a double-take waiting to happen. In Armando Iannucci's brilliant satire, In the Loop, he leaves the reactions to the audience, trusting the blank looks of the hapless UK minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) and frothingly profane tirades of the communications chief Malcom Tucker (Peter Capaldi) to do the work. When that's not enough, he throws in Steve Coogan as a manic constituent, and then doubles down on the all-too-plausible idiocy of Toby Wright (Chris Addison), whose political ambitions as Simon's aide lead to leaked intel, romantic entanglements, and last-ditch waffling.

Aaron Sorkin would be proud of all the semantic twists that occur on the road to war with the Middle East, especially as an anti-war faction led by US Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and General Miller (James Gandolfini) face off with the pro-war manipulations of Linton Barwick (the perfectly cast David Rasche), using papers from their aides and politicos in the field as pawns in one wildly comic chess match. In addition to the distanced documentary-style shooting of the action, which keeps things feeling authentic, Iannucci fills each shot with sight gags, from the size-differential between Miller and Barwick to the sad evening Toby and Simon spend watching oceanography in their underwear, or the more overt laughs of Karen stuffing her bleeding mouth full of toilet paper, or Miller calculating the projected death toll on a little girl's talking calculator.

It's this use of contrast that ultimately puts war--and the big and small talk behind it--into perspective, and that hopelessly daft perspective itself that keeps the audience laughing.

Artifacts of Consequence

Photo/Jeff Clarke

In the tradition of great plays, there are at least two ways to experience Ashlin Halfnight's terrific and wholly original Artifacts of Consequence. And director Kristjan Thor (as he did with Electric Pear's The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents) invests so much in the circumstances of both experiences--a romantic thriller--that we're constantly affected on multiple levels. Literally so, in fact: the play begins as the audience files in through the side door, becoming this world's privileged "evaluators."

In the first interpretation, "consequence" means importance, and refers to the clash between the romantic notions of Dallas (Jayd McCarty), a preservationist, and the realism of Minna (Rebecca Lingafelter), a survivalist. For Dallas, life isn't worth living without saving the beauty of the outside world--forget the practicality of Converse sneakers: he craves the magic of fiction, like The Crucible--whereas Minna, who maintains the labyrinthine archives of their post-disaster shelter, understands all too well the self-indulgent sacrifices of art. After all, without food (actually, FRPs: food replacement pills), there is no room for beauty.

This is the more chilling second interpretation: Dallas and Minna are the resulting artifacts (i.e., "of consequence") of the world's climactic decline. Despite clinging to routine in their shelter (shown by repeated dialogue), the water levels are still rising, contagions run rampant, and their girl Ari (Sara Buffamanti) will never be permitted to see the "above." Instead, she quotes from movies like Pretty Woman and learns from old issues of Glamour. Things grow more complicated in her small world when a stranger, Theo (Marty Keiser), arrives, giving her an outlet for her newfound sexuality.

Although Jennifer de Fouchier's industrial set makes it look utterly plausible, Artifacts of Consequence is actually a high concept play, and it's Halfnight's dialogue that sells it. Things not only make sense, but do so in surprising, revealing ways: Minna is protective of Ari, but shows it by giving Ari a copy of Deliverance to watch. Ari, who has had little experience with love, pulls moves from Dirty Dancing but also comes up with original nuggets of her own: "You make me want to go bake a meat pie with my heart!" Theo is attracted to Ari, and so he flirts back on her level (a stomach's gurgling has never been so poignant), and yet, fearful of being expelled from this poor-man's Eden, holds himself back. As for Dallas, he's practically beatific when talking about the first edition of Catcher in the Rye, but totally grounded when it comes to strangers.

It's so smooth that it takes us a moment to be taken aback when the actors start to address us, or come into our section to fix a leak. Sweetness is used as a weapon (you'll never look at a Twinkie the same way). Even a trio of blindfolded actors (Tobias Burns, Hanna Cheek, and Amy Newhall) being brought on stage to enact and help evaluate some of the more etherial artifacts cause only the slightest of eye-flutters. By the time you understand how all of this is changing the way we actually perceive and evaluate the world--for instance, a gentle rendition of Oklahoma's "Oh What A Beautiful Morning"--those flutters may have turned to unabashed tears.

It should go without saying that such originality avoids stereotypes, but it's worth repeating, especially for the cast's sake. Without McCarty's bright idealism, Buffamanti's fierce naivity, Keiser's nervy nervousness, or--especially--Lingafelter's desperate strength, the play might be dismissed as clever propaganda. Instead, it has put the "art" in artifacts and removed the "con" from consequence: Artifacts of Consequence is an important play that's a joy to watch.

Homer's Iliad (Book One)

Photo/Richard Termine

Aquila Theater bills their latest adaptation as Homer's Iliad (Book One), but if you just had flashbacks of stuffy classrooms, rest assured--it's not. It's Peter Meineck's Iliad, a seventy minute version of the first book (Homer had 24), and a hodgepodge of styles. Desiree Sanchez's silent, slow-motion movements mix with Stanley Lombardo's straight-talking, modern translation, and a smoke machine is much abused. Anthony Cochrane's score switches from industrial sounds of aircraft to classic chords, and this goes well with Meineck's stripped stage (a few military-grade crates) and dark, war-tattered uniforms. The tone of the piece changes so often, it's hard to say what it is, but here goes: by sticking to the Iliad (instead of making something new, like Banana Bag & Bodice's comically tragic Beowulf), Meineck has brought back the oral tradition in all its uneven glory.

At the play's start, the six-man ensemble somberly interjects narrative as Chryses begs Agamemnon to release his pillaged Trojan daughter, Chryseis; soon after, as Agamemnon and Achilles face off in a contest of petulance, the ensemble is in the midst of the action, announcing Achilles's thoughts even as they hold him back. By the play's end, the actors are cracking up in Olympus, watching Hephaestus trying to cheer up his mother, Hera, who is jealous of the favor Zeus plans to grant Achilles's mother. They also find time to sing (in Greek) a few drinking songs by the besieged gates of Troy. On second thought, it is a bit like being in a classroom, but only in the sense that every student reads the Iliad with a different spin: what Meineck's done is to push all these voices together, hoping to make real characters out of poetic descriptions.

Where he succeeds best is in the comic milieu, presumably because his actors know how to play that far better than some of the more fantastic "drama." Jay Painter begins the show as a bland father, Chryses, reciting lines--but he comes to life as the sarcastic old warrior, Nestor, and even more so as Zeus, punning on how he can "Hera" his wife coming. The ensemble helps to coax things along, too: Nathan Flower makes for a decently aggravated Agamemnon, a trait that gets some laughs when the cast "nominates" him to play Hephaestus. The drama isn't bad, and John Buxton shows more range to Achilles than that warrior is usually afforded, but it's hard to be serious when a Greek chorus is whispering your every move to the audience.

The one major faltering point of Meineck's Iliad--and it's a make-or-break moment--is that its reliance on stagecraft makes it a very transparent and artificial work. There's no sense of transportation; if anything, there's a constant awareness of the work itself. For some, being surprised by a neat trick--a gas-masked god whispering in Agamemnon's dreams--will be enough. Those awaiting a fuller illusion, however, are bound to be disappointed.

[Update (4/21 @ 11:21 AM): There are a lot of errors in the published reviews of this production, which speaks somewhat to how confusing this sort of stylistic interpretation can be if prior context is required. Taking responsibility for myself, I mistakenly called Achilles Apollo; I regret the error, and have corrected it.]